Foundation and Earth

"You brought on board. Why do you want me to wash it?"

"I should think you'd want to. It's a very bright creature. It's picking up Galactic words quickly. It never forgets once I explain something. Of course, I'm helping it do so."

"Naturally."

"Yes. I keep it calm. I kept it in a daze during most of the disturbing events on the planet. I saw to it that it slept on board ship and I'm trying to divert its mind just a little bit from its lost robot, Jemby, that, apparently, it loved very much."

"So that it ends up liking it here, I suppose."

"I hope so. It's adaptable because it's young, and I encourage that by as much as I dare influence its mind. I'm going to teach it to speak Galactic."

"Then you wash it. Understood?"

Bliss shrugged. "I will, if you insist, but I would want it to feel friendly with each of us. It would be useful to have each of us perform functions. Surely you can co-operate in that."

"Not to this extent. And when you finish washing it, get rid of it. I want to talk to you."

Bliss said, with a sudden edge of hostility, "How do you mean, get rid of it?"

"I don't mean dump it through the airlock. I mean, put it in your room. Sit it down in a corner. I want to talk at you."

"I'll be at your service," she said coldly.

He stared after her, nursing his wrath for the moment, then moved into the pilot-room, and activated the viewscreen.

Solaria was a dark circle with a curving crescent of light at the left. Trevize placed his hands on the desk to make contact with the computer and found his anger cooling at once. One had to be calm to link mind and computer effectively and, eventually, conditioned reflex linked handhold and serenity.

There were no artifactitious objects about the ship in any direction, out as far as the planet itself. The Solarians (or their robots, most likely) could not, or would not, follow.

Good enough. He might as well get out of the night-shadow, then. If he continued to recede, it would, in any case, vanish as Solaria's disc grew smaller than that of the more distant, but much larger, sun that it circled.

He set the computer to move the ship out of the planetary plane as well, since that would make it possible to accelerate with greater safety. They would then more quickly reach a region where space curvature would be low enough to make the Jump secure.

And, as often on such occasions, he fell to studying the stars. They were almost hypnotic in their quiet changelessness. All their turbulence and instability were wiped out by the distance that left them only dots of light.

One of those dots might well be the sun about which Earth revolved-the original sun, under whose radiation life began, and under whose beneficence humanity evolved.

Surely, if the Spacer worlds circled stars that were bright and prominent members of the stellar family, and that were nevertheless unlisted in the computer's Galactic map, the same might be true of the sun.

Or was it only the suns of the Spacer worlds that were omitted because of some primeval treaty agreement that left them to themselves? Would Earth's sun be included in the Galactic map, but not marked off from the myriads of stars that were sun-like, yet had no habitable planet in orbit about itself?

There were after all, some thirty billion sun-like stars in the Galaxy, and only about one in a thousand had habitable planets in orbits about them. There might be a thousand such habitable planets within a few hundred parsecs of his present position. Should he sift through the sun-like stars one by one, searching for them?

Or was the original sun not even in this region of the Galaxy? How many other regions were convinced the sun was one of their neighbors, that they were primeval Settlers-?

He needed information, and so far he had none.

He doubted strongly whether even the closest examination of the millennial ruins on Aurora would give information concerning Earth's location. He doubted even more strongly that the Solarians could be made to yield information.

Then, too, if all information about Earth had vanished out of the great Library at Trantor; if no information about Earth remained in the great Collective Memory of Gaia; there seemed little chance that any information that might have existed on the lost worlds of the Spacers would have been overlooked.

And if he found Earth's sun and, then, Earth itself, by the sheerest good fortune-would something force him to be unaware of the fact? Was Earth's defense absolute? Was its determination to remain in hiding unbreakable?

What was he looking for anyway?

Was it Earth? Or was it the flaw in Seldon's Plan that he thought (for no clear reason) he might find on Earth?

Seldon's Plan had been working for five centuries now, and would bring the human species (so it was said) to safe harbor-at last in the womb of a Second Galactic Empire, greater than the First, a nobler and a freer one-and yet he, Trevize, had voted against it, and for Galaxia.